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Introduction

Pick one of these alternatives that best fits your situation:

(a) I have a freshly installed Linux system with one of the supported distributions and versions, and I want to install the open source P4 development tools on it. (This might be a new VM created for this purpose.)

(b) I have a system with a 64-bit Intel/AMD processor, and I am comfortable downloading and running a virtual machine image with the P4 open source tools already compiled and installed, e.g. using a virtual machine application like VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, Parallels, etc.

If your answer is (a), see the section below Quick instructions for successful install script run.

If your answer is (b), there are several VM images with many of the open source P4 development tools already installed available from links in this table. Each of them comes with a user account named p4 with password p4 intended for use in developing P4 programs. They also have a user account vagrant (password vagrant).

The "Development" VM images contain a copy of the source code from which the P4 development tools were built in the home directory of the 'vagrant' user account. If you know how, this source code can be updated and compiled again.

The "Release" VM images are smaller, and contain only binaries of the P4 development tools, installed via Debian packages, which can be upgraded to more recent versions if such have been released.

Date published Operating system Development VM Image link Release VM Image link README link Tested working on macOS? Tested working on Windows?
2024-Sep-02 Ubuntu 24.04 2.4 GByte VM image no such VM created -- Combo24 no
2024-Aug-01 Ubuntu 24.04 2.3 GByte VM image no such VM created README Combo23 no
2024-Aug-01 Ubuntu 20.04 3.0 GByte VM image no such VM created README Combo23 no
2024-Jul-04 Ubuntu 24.04 2.3 GByte VM image no such VM created README Combo23 no
2024-Jul-04 Ubuntu 20.04 3.0 GByte VM image no such VM created README Combo23 no
2024-Jan-01 Ubuntu 20.04 2.8 GByte VM image 2.2 GBytes VM image README Combo21 no
2023-Jul-01 Ubuntu 20.04 3.0 GByte VM image 2.4 GBytes VM image README Combo18 Combo19
2023-Jan-01 Ubuntu 20.04 4.2 GByte VM image 2.2 GBytes VM image README Combo12 Combo13
2022-Jul-01 Ubuntu 20.04 4.2 GByte VM image 2.4 GBytes VM image README Combo3 Combo5
2022-Jan-01 Ubuntu 20.04 4 GByte VM image 2 GBytes VM image README Combo2 Combo5
2021-Sep-12 Ubuntu 20.04 4 GByte VM image (none) README Combo1 Combo4

Version combinations I have used above for testing VM images:

Combination id Operating system VM software
Combo1 macOS 10.14.6 VirtualBox 6.1.26
Combo2 macOS 10.14.6 VirtualBox 6.1.30
Combo3 macOS 11.6.5 VirtualBox 6.1.30
Combo4 Windows 10 Enterprise VirtualBox 6.1.26
Combo5 Windows 10 Enterprise VirtualBox 6.1.30
Combo12 macOS 12.6.x VirtualBox 6.1.40
Combo13 Windows 11 Enterprise VirtualBox 6.1.40
Combo18 macOS 12.6.x VirtualBox 7.0.8
Combo19 Windows 11 Enterprise VirtualBox 7.0.8
Combo21 macOS 12.7.x VirtualBox 7.0.12
Combo23 macOS 12.7.x VirtualBox 7.0.18
Combo24 macOS 12.7.x VirtualBox 7.0.20

Quick instructions for successful install script run

Start with:

  • an unmodified fresh installation of one of these supported operating systems:
    • Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 24.04
      • These have been most tested on x86_64 processors (also known as amd64), running either Windows or macOS (on an Intel-based Mac system), running an Ubuntu Linux VM inside of VirtualBox.
        • See here for instructions I have successfully followed in creating Ubuntu Linux VMs within VirtualBox.
      • In 2024 I began supporting aarch64 processor architectures (also known as arm64), at least Apple Silicon Macs with a VM created with one of these virtualization programs:
        • UTM - See here for instructions on creating an Ubuntu Linux VM within UTM that have worked for me.
        • VirtualBox, which now has Beta level support for Apple Silicon Macs starting with version 7.1.0.
    • Fedora Linux
      • Only a few Fedora releases are supported by the older install-p4dev-v6.sh and install-p4dev-v7.sh scripts, no longer tested by me. You can search for fedora in these scripts to see which versions of Fedora they support.
      • To get a copy of older Fedora releases, see one of these places:
  • The system must have:
    • at least 2 GB of RAM (4 GB recommended)
    • at least 25 GB of free disk space (not 25 GB of disk space total for the VM, but 25 GB free disk space after the OS has been installed), and
    • a reliable Internet connection that is up for the entire duration of running the install script -- it will download approximately 2 to 3 GByte of data.

If you use the install-p4dev-v5.sh script (supported only for Ubuntu 20.04 on x86_64 systems), you need only 3 GB of free disk space, and about 250 MByte of data will be downloaded from the Internet. See the table below for more details.

Note: These scripts have been reported NOT WORKING on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). I have had success running supported versions of Ubuntu Linux using VirtualBox on these host operating systems:

  • macOS 10.14.x
  • macOS 10.15.x
  • macOS 12.6.x
  • macOS 13.6.x
  • macOS 14.6.x
  • Windows 10
  • Windows 11

Then run the commands below in a terminal. Note:

  • You may run the commands from any directory you wish -- I typically run it from the home directory of my account. Whichever directory is your current directory when you start the script, is where new directories with names like p4c, behavioral-model, mininet, grpc, etc. will be created. I have heard a report from someone using this that in a VM where they created a shared folder between the guest OS and the host OS, and tried to run one of the install scripts in that directory, it failed. It worked when they later tried running in a folder that was only within the guest OS, which is the only way I have ever tested this script myself, and thus strongly recommend.
  • I have only tried these install scripts when running as a normal user, i.e. not as the superuser root. There are several sudo commands in the install script. I have tried to write this script so that you should be prompted to enter your password once very soon after you start the script, and then never need to enter it again while the script runs. The only commands run as superuser are those that install files in system-wide directories such as /usr/local/bin.
$ sudo apt install git     # For Ubuntu
$ sudo dnf install git     # For Fedora
$ git clone https://github.com/jafingerhut/p4-guide
$ ./p4-guide/bin/install-p4dev-v8.sh |& tee log.txt

# If you used v8 version of the install script, see Note 1 below.

Replace the v8 in install-p4dev-v8.sh with v5 if you prefer to use that version. More details on the differences between them are in the next section.

The |& tee log.txt part of the command is not necessary for the install to work. It causes the output of the script to be saved to the file log.txt, as well as appear in the terminal window. The output is about 10,000 lines long on a good run, so saving it to a file is good if you want to see what it did.

Note 1: If you use install-p4dev-v8.sh and use bash as your command shell (the default on Ubuntu and Fedora Linux), you should execute the command source p4setup.bash in every bash shell where you wish to run the P4 development tools. You can add the source p4setup.bash line to your $HOME/.bashrc file, so that it will automatically be run for you in any new bash shell you create.

Which install script should I use?

I would recommend using install-p4dev-v8.sh as shown in the example commands above. It does take a significant amount of time to install, and a decent amount of disk space. However, install-p4dev-v5.sh installs pre-compiled binaries last updated in Aug 2023, and it is not clear whether anyone will ever take the effort required to update them to a more recent version.

Minor note: As of 2023-Jan when I updated the PTF tests in this p4-guide repository to use p4runtime-shell as the Python API for table add/delete/modify, a system that results from running install-p4dev-v5.sh can run the exercises in the p4lang/tutorials repository, but does not have the p4runtime-shell package installed, so cannot run the PTF tests in the p4-guide repository. If you install p4runtime-shell system-wide, you can then run the PTF tests in the p4-guide repository, but then the exercises in p4lang/tutorials fail to run, probably because of some conflict in how the Python packages are installed. This can probably be worked around by using Python virtual environments, but I have not tested this. A system installed using any other version of the install script does not have this issue.

All of the current install scripts install everything required to enable you to run the examples in the tutorials repository, since 2021.

See the tables below if you want to make a more informed decision.

The scripts in the next table below have all been tested monthly through 2024. They all include the following:

Script Versions of Ubuntu it works on Free disk space required Time to run on 2019 MacBook Pro with VirtualBox Data downloaded from Internet protobuf grpc Where are Python3 packages installed?
install-p4dev-v8.sh 24.04, 22.04, 20.04 22 GB 120 mins 2 GB binary lib version varies by OS binary lib varies by OS, Python grpcio package v1.51.3, or v1.59.3 on Ubuntu 24.04 ~/p4dev-python-venv virtual environment
install-p4dev-v5.sh 20.04 2 GB 3 mins 250 MB v3.6.1 v1.16.1 ? System-wide directories, e.g. /usr/local/lib/python3.*/dist-packages

Other details

I have moved many details that are only for running additional tests, and notes of historical interest, to a separate article. If you have installed a working system from the instructions above, there is NO REASON to read the other article. You are good to go without ever having to read it.

If you understand that, that other article is here.